Follow the White Rabbit’ - a video about how the FET2RIN project helped an entrepreneur take a research result to market - has won the European Commission’s ‘Showcase your project!’ competition.

Follow the White Rabbit- a video about how the FET2RIN project helped an entrepreneur take a research result to market - has won the European Commission’s ’Showcase your project!’ competition.

Almost 300 EC-funded research projects entered the EC’s competition, each submitting a short YouTube video that the EC then added to a dedicated playlist and promoted on social media.

With almost 18000 views and - crucially - over 3060 likes, META’s entry on behalf of FET2RIN won the popular vote.

With the EC’s awarding the prize based on the number of YouTube Likes, the story of White Rabbit - a software spinoff from a ’blue sky’ research project funded by the EC’s Future & Emerging Technologiesprogramme - clearly resonated with a wider public.Apart from demonstrating META staff’s previously undetected acting skills, the win also demonstrates that stories about the people involved in research projects tend to be more effective than stories about the projects themselves, which tend to be more bureaucratic. Rather than simply presenting FET2RIN, the video presents Roland Acosta, a phD student of the University of Trento involved in a FET-funded research project. Roland attended a FET2RIN training session run by META, leading eventually to the creation of a startup spin-off.

More:

• Blog: read the full story behind the video here.

• Event: Both video and FET2rin project will be presented as the next ESOF conference (Toulouse, July 9-14) as the competition prize.